George Barker, At Thurgarton Church

All Saints Church, Thurgarton
a small thatched flint church seen from the south
showing the nave and a smaller chancel
photo by Andrew Lowe Watson
(image source: wiki)
no copyright infringement intended

To the memory of my father

At Thurgarton Church the sun

burns the winter clouds over

the gaunt Danish stone

and thatched reeds that cover

the barest chapel I know.

I could compare it with

the Norse longboats that bore

burning the body forth

in honour from the shore

of great fjords long ago.

The sky is red and cold

overhead, and three small

sturdy trees keep a hold

on the world and the stone wall

that encloses the dead below.

I enter and find I stand

in a great barn, bleak and bare.

Like ice the winter ghosts and

the white walls gleam and flare

and flame as the sun drops low.

And I see, then, that slowly

the December day has gone.

I stand in the silence, not wholly

believing I am alone.

Somehow I cannot go.

Then a small wind rose, and the trees

began to crackle and stir

and I watched the moon by degrees

ascend in the window till her

light cut a wing in the shadow.

I thought: the House of the Dead.

The dead moon inherits it.

And I seem in a sense to have died

as I rise from where I sit

and out into darkness go.

I know as I leave I shall pass

where Thurgarton’s dead lie

at those old stones in the grass

under the cold moon’s eye.

I see the old bones glow.

No, they do not sleep here

in the long holy night of

the serene soul, but keep here

a dark tenancy and the right of

rising up to go.

Here the owl and soul shriek with

the voice of the dead as they turn

on the polar spit and burn

without hope and seek with

out hope the holy home below.

Yet to them the mole and

mouse bring a wreath and a breath

of the flowering leaves of the soul, and

it is from the Tree of Death

the leaves of life grow.

The rain, the sometime summer

rain on a memory of roses

will fall lightly and come a-

mong them as it erases

summers so long ago.

And the voices of those

once so much loved will flitter

over the nettled rows

of graves, and the holly tree twitter

like friends they used to know.

And not far away the

icy and paralysed stream

has found it also, that day the

flesh became glass and a dream

with no where to go.

Haunting the December

fields their bitter lives

entreat us to remember

the lost spirit that grieves

over these fields like a scarecrow.

That grieves over all it ever

did and all, all not

done, that grieves over

its crosspurposed lot:

to know and not to know.

The masterless dog sits

outside the church door

with dereliction haunting its

heart that hankers for

the hand that loved it so.

Not in a small grave

outside the stone wall

will the love that it gave

ever be returned, not for all

time or tracks in the snow.

More mourned the death of the dog

than our bones ever shall

receive from the hand of god

this bone again, or all

that high hand could bestow.

As I stand by the porch

I believe that no one has heard

here in Thurgarton Church

a single veritable word

save the unspoken No.

The godfathered negative

that responds to our mistaken

incredulous and heartbroken

desire above all to live

as though things were not so.

Desire to live as though the

two-footed clay stood up

proud never to know the

tempests that rage in the cup

under a rainbow.

Desire above all to live

as though the soul was stone,

believing we cannot give

or love since we are alone

and always will be so.

That heartbroken desire

to live as though no light

ever set the seas on fire

and no sun burned at night

or Mercy walked to and fro.

The proud flesh cries: I am not

caught up in the great cloud

of my unknowing. But that

proud flesh had endowed

us with the cloud we know.

To this the unspoken No

of the dead god responds

and then the whirlwinds blow

over all the things and beyond

and the dead mop and mow.

And there in the livid dust

and bones of death we search

until we find as we must

outside Thurgarton Church

only wild grasses blow.

I hear the old bone in me cry

and the dying spirit call:

I have forfeited all

and once and for all must die

and this is all that I know.

For now in a wild way we

know that justice is served

and that we die in the clay we

dread, desired, and deserved,

awaiting no Judgement Day.

(source: Poem Hunter)

(George Barker)